Industry representatives of the Home Computing Initiative (HCI) were talking with the government about changing the scheme so minimum wage workers could reap its benefits, just a week before it was scrapped.

xkoto is a relatively new company - it only came to market late last year — however, it has some neat technology. The company's product, called GRIDIRON, provides dynamic load balancing for DB2 in transaction processing environments.

Yesterday, the Australian recording industry went through its annual ritual of announcing a fall in music sales. Although, this time ARIA didn't blame digital music piracy for the fall - fans of the ARIA blame game will be pleased to see they industry included the obligatory reference to digital music piracy anyway - just for old time's sake.

Intel's quad-core processor, 'Kentsfield', may come to market earlier than anticipated. Intel's official release window spans the whole of 2007, but when the details of the chip emerged late last year, it was said to be earmarked for a mid-2007 debut. Now, apparently, it's coming out in Q1 next year.

I have long espoused the cause of semantic approaches in a variety of areas: I think that natural language processing works better in search engines, and I think that LAS (which has just been acquired by IBM) offers just about the best name matching on the market, thanks to its semantic and linguistic basis as opposed to the statistical approach that is common among data quality vendors.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've been interested in Roman history. It still amazes me when I think about ancient Rome: the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, bringing countless advances to far-flung nations, yet still barbaric in astonishing ways, finally brought low due to a wide variety of causes and plunging the lands it had conquered into darkness for a millennia. In particular, the Roman emperors present a parade of fascinating characters, with many of them beautifully illustrating Lord Acton's famous dictum that, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Fujitsu has launched a 200GB Serial ATA 2.5in hard disk drive designed for notebook computers, the most capacious of its kind, the company claimed today. It said the drive's size makes it ideal for vendors who want to equip their laptops with PVR functionality, or for anyone producing "digital home appliance" products.

If you’re a survey junkie, you no doubt love the sheer onslaught of silly press activity that’s been happening recently in technology world. IPTV, the all-healing panacea, is so hot almost everyone wants to do it despite not having given a lot of thought to the real delivery issues that it will involve for them. The most absurd surveys were conducted by Harris and Accenture – both offering contradictory results that weren’t a lot of help to anyone.

Pipex has become the latest telco to woo SMEs dumped by Cable and Wireless (C&W). Four weeks ago C&W announced a major restructuring of its business. As well as announcing up to 3,000 job losses, the firm also revealed plans to axe the number of customers from around 30,000 to just 3,000.

Why did no one think of this before? Like all other mouse makers, Japan's Elecom ships its new wireless input device, dubbed the "M-MBDUR", in a box. But this time it's no ordinary case - the plastic packaging doubles up as the rodent's recharger and its wireless transceiver.

Watching HD TV just got cheaper in the UK, thanks to hardware seller Evesham which has launched a 32in HD Ready telly for a mere £750. Not only is it rather less expensive than comparably specced screens, but it's loaded with connection options and comes with a three-year warranty.

Web services may be a clever way of conducting business with or delivering services to customers, but it also constitutes a helluva risk – after all, users get involved in downloading code from hither and yon, and are probably far too busy with their own work to ponder too deeply on whether that downloaded code is as wholesome as they assume it to be.

South Korea's Pantech is following Sony Ericsson's lead with a camera phone that looks more like a photography product, it said today. Pantech will offer the phone, dubbed the PG-8000, through Vietnamese cellco Glory Star.

The iBuzz, the infamous iPod-enhanced vibrator, has...er...come to the US. Already on sale in the UK, the device has now gone one sale to North Americans keen to really 'feel' the music, movies or even video games...

Any reader who doubts the ability of the mighty Reg to influence world events - from bringing down eBay auctions to provoking thunderstorms and the curdling of milk - would do well to digest the following from one Clive Worth: a serial-shagging former miner who was in 2004 dumped from a dating agency after bedding 100 lonely hearts. Read on...

You'll gather by our letters headline today that some of you have objected to our extensive coverage of Wikipedia explaining how - given time - it will undermine the very fabric of Western civilisation and reduce humanity to a few small groups of hunter-gatherers living in turf-rooved hovels as a result of its disastrous attempt to make all human knowledge available online.

Sussex University's top brass were last night hauled up in front of an emergency House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to explain their plan to end chemistry teaching and research at the institution.

Doctors caring for the six human guinea pig victims of the disastrous TeGenero drug trial have discharged two of the men. Three others remain as in-patients at Northwick Park Hospital, London, while one man is still in a critical condition after being administered an experimental immune treatment more than two weeks ago.

The wireless router market is a tough one to crack. There are already many well-established brand names that offer products at very reasonable prices. To compete successfully, you have to either offer something new and innovative, and Asus has tried to do a bit of both. Its WL-530G pocket router is by no means a unique product - it does what every other Ethernet router does - but it's about half the size of most of them...

The UK has stormed into the top ten of the world's IT nations, according to a report by the World Economic Forum, which attempts to assess the success of countries using IT and the net to increase competitiveness and economic growth.

Dell UK appears to believe Intel's integrated graphics cores provide plenty of power for its laptop customers' needs. All but one of the PC giant's Inspiron notebooks - including the recently released 6400, highlighted for its "versatile entertainment" provision - now ship without a discrete GPU, it has emerged.

The personal details of 20,000 people who made complaints about the police in Hong Kong have leaked onto the net. The apparently accidental leak of personal data submitted to Hong Kong's Independent Police Complaints Council (IPPC) has caused a huge flap in the Chinese city.

The Conservatives will be voting in support of continued tax breaks for home computers tonight, after taking up the cause of PC traders who face hard times after the HCI scheme was scrapped by the Chancellor.

Future incarnations of Bluetooth will be based upon ultrawideband (UWB), the wireless technology's steering organisation announced today. It said it will use the version of UWB specified by the WiMedia Alliance (WMA) to create a version of Bluetooth that will operate in unlicensed spectrum using chipsets scheduled to sample in Q3 2007.

The much-admired Tuttle, Oklahoma can-do spirit has survived this week's thrashing at the hands of Linux fanboys everywhere. In a gesture proving Tuttle's resiliency, city namesake and US ambassador to the UK Robert Tuttle has struck out against London's "congestion charge" and earned himself the designation of "chiseling little crook."